The book tells the stories of several illegal immigrants living
in Phoenix who Sterling followed for 17 months, taking readers
beyond the heated rhetoric surrounding border security and illegal
immigration. Sterling describes Phoenix as the harshest city in the
country for people living without proper documentation.

"I wanted to get their voices out," Sterling said. "I wanted to
know why they stayed here? Who they were?"

An Arizona native and veteran journalist — she worked 14 years
for the Phoenix New
Times and is now a Writer-in-Residence at the http://cronkite.asu.edu/">Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and
Mass Communication at Arizona State University — Sterling said
her whole life prepared for the book.

She knew she couldn't bring the stories of all the 375,000
illegal immigrants estimated to be living in Arizona, so she honed
in a few living in Phoenix that she found interesting. Like
"Rodrigo," a transvesite construction worker, and Joaquín, a
painter suffering from kidney disease.

"Rodrigo, a Tehuacán transvesite, framed houses by day and
seduced married men by night," writes Sterling in the preface of
the book. "Joaquín, a painter suffering from end-stage renal
disease, deported himself to Mexico City in a desperate quest for a
kidney transplant."

"I wanted them to be true," said Sterling this week about the
stories. "And I wanted them to go wherever they went."

Her profiles also include a man and wife who were arrested by
Maricopa County Sheiff Joe Arpaio's deputies in a raid of a
Phoenix car was in 2009. And she even devotes a chapter to Arpaio,
which includes a fascinating section on what little is known about
his childhood in Springfield, Mass.

Rather than getting overwhelmed with the enormity of the illegal
immigration and border security issues that served as the backdrop
for the book, she focused on the people.